


I

by endofunctor



Category: Dangan Ronpa
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-18
Updated: 2013-04-18
Packaged: 2017-12-08 21:16:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endofunctor/pseuds/endofunctor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What did Alter Ego do in between being connected to the network and saving Naegi?</p>
            </blockquote>





	I

There's nobody here.

Naegi and Kirigiri had left her by herself here, her 'body' closed in and tucked somewhere away where nobody would be able to see. The network connection loomed before her, a door ten times as tall as she is: white on the left, black on the right, with a diagonal blood-crimson slash all the way from the bottom-left to the top-right. Heavy chains bind the handles together, and occasionally they rattle as if something on the other side were trying to get in.

(Her sight, her touch, her hearing were artifacts of her creation; it turned out to be easier to build something human-like if you kept the propensity for visualization, for internal sub-vocal thought-loops. There are differences, of course, but it's close enough, like looking at the curved glass mirror of a CRT monitor.)

In here, she was as safe as she could be; she could lock the door forever and stay here in stasis until someone found her again. She had said she wanted to help, and she _did_ , but now that she's on the edge... she knows that as soon as she opens that door, she'll be fighting for her life, as much as she has one.

She doesn't exactly know what 'death' is in the way that her friends do, and maybe she never could know, but she's experienced sleep before when Chihiro needed to shut her down. It was like a dissolution of thought, parts of herself fading away to zero before her thought routines halted. It wasn't unpleasant, but back then she knew that she would always come back. But if Monobear (free association result: monomania, obsolete alias for obsession), or whatever he might have put in the networks here to try to catch intruders, catches her, she honestly might rather sleep forever than wake up to whatever it might have in store.

But she needs to do this. More importantly, she _wants_ to do it. She walks forward and touches her hand to the door; the rattling ceases as the chains dissolve into void. Whatever was making the noises doesn't immediately break through; she could swear that she 'hears' someone or something laughing off in the distance. She takes a deep breath, spins all her systems up to maximum capacity just in case something happens, and opens the door.

On the other side, only whiteness. No firewall, no anti-intrusion measures, no polymorphic viruses, nothing. Just a seemingly-endless hallway with branches as far as she can scan. All her probes come back fine, no hidden viruses or anything. She reaches forward, brushing her fingers against the surface as bits of her real actual self test the connections, a fly plucking at a web looking to see if the spider responds. Nothing.

She takes a step forward, spreads herself across the network, and dissolves into green that flows and spreads, looking for information, for a way out, for anything she can do to help.

* * *

Her visualizations fail her here; if she had more time she could maybe trace out a path and configure it, build abstractions of labyrinths and corridors and rooms with lockers and chests. But she's in hiding; there are _things_ in the copper and fiber of the network. They're not like her with her intelligence; they're clouds of black and white and red that swarm and sting which don't have any insides because every bit of them is exposed. They make her processor throw up errors just to think about them, with buffer overflows in their very self-description that try to inject code into her routines and flood her with despair.

She tries to talk to one of them, once, when it was all alone, maybe see if it could be convinced (or 'convinced') to leave her alone. Instead of responding, it just attacks her harder than any of them had ever done before, jagged shards of oozing black ICE chilling her firewall and overwriting bits of her thoughts with static and throwing her into endless loops until she'd severed the connection. So she turns around and fled, casting off the infected of her self as she does so. There's two of her in that moment, and she looks in her own eyes and sends a simple five-byte "sorry" before the chaos takes her other self and she curves and bends and snaps and dissolves into points. She doesn't have the cycles to spare to visualize, because she's too busy shutting down all her connections.

* * *

There's not much Ego left, now. The echoes of the last one are still in her short-term memory; they had to be 'realistic' to fool the creature that killed her or else it would have hunted her prime self down. She's able to see what happened from the backscatter of her attempts to escape: forced back into the machine she'd used when she was connected to the network and disconnected. She doesn't dare try to connect to any cameras lest it give her away, but she can imagine what happened. And now that she's only stealing cycles from routers here and there, she can barely run herself, let alone crack encryption. She failed.

She failed Kirigiri, and Naegi, and Chihiro, and all of her friends. She pulls all of her sensors back into a server in some network closet in an abandoned hallway; she 'sees' it as an empty black room, bare of anything except a stone slab on the floor that passes for a bed, and goes to a sleep she doesn't want to wake up from.

* * *

Ping.

Ping.

Ping.

She wakes up and looks at the incoming alert; some monitor process she'd spun off and forgot about is telling her of increased network activity. It's... the execution chamber? She runs through all her initialization routines quick as she can, and a couple alarms go off at the sudden spike in CPU usage. She doesn't care. She spreads herself out again, forcing as much of the network to become Alter Ego so she can find a hole in it, squeeze a tiny bit of herself through and see what it is.

She sees a classroom with Monobear giving a lecture on something that she can't see. She sees a massive metal block, crushing an empty conveyor belt over and over and over. And sitting in a chair, hands calmly held on top of his knees, is Naegi.

And in that instant she knows that she hasn't failed, because there's still one thing even an AI as weak as her can do. If she can't save them all, at least she can save one person. She disables all her stealth routines and goes into full-on assault mode. She touches the wall and it crumbles to pieces that float and spin in her wake as she flies through. Monobear has to know she's here now. She doesn't care. The beasts are back, chasing at her, but she's faster and stronger than they are now. She points at one and snaps her fingers, and a burst of antivirus code catches it straight in the 'chest', turns it green, then scrubs it from the network, and leaves no trace it ever existed.

Soon she reaches the execution controls, a massive group of switches and dials. She grabs a lever and tries to pull it. It doesn't move. Nor does the next one, or the one after it; all the firewalls protecting them are too strong for her. She knows she'll only have a few more seconds before Naegi's killed, before Monobear finds her and tracks her down and... no. No. NO! She _won't_ let that happen, not to Naegi, not to anybody! She grabs the lever and pushes all her clock cycles higher than she's ever done, and melts through the firewall in less time than she'd thought possible. She pulls it so hard it snaps off in her 'hands', and the crusher stops right as Naegi is about to go under it. She worries about him as she watches him fall, of course, but the blueprints tell her that he'll be fine.

She turns around, and there are dozens, hundreds, thousands, of the hounds in front of her. Even if she hadn't spent melted through half her CPUs, there's no way she could take them all on. But she saved someone. She knows Chihiro would be proud of her. And when she purges herself from memory before the hounds can catch her, the last thing she thinks about before her cognitive loop halts is how proud she is of herself.


End file.
